He sat up, prodded by an abrupt, anxious realization that he had forgotten to type out the last of his daily reports. Damn Al, he should’ve reminded me. The Captain and Lieutenant Timms were sticklers for keeping up reports. He’d go in an hour early, Casey decided, and clear up his paperwork. And maybe by morning there’d be some trace of Holly Berry’s uncle. With even better luck, his inquiries at Synanon about her brother might have borne fruit overnight.
Yawning, he lay back again, folding his hands under his head, staring into the wind-stirred dark outside his windows as he mentally worked back through the day. Detecting was like panning gold, he thought. You dig through mountains of useless muck for a couple of nuggets. And unless you’re lucky, you may pass up even these as pebbles…
From Farr’s apartment they had gone directly to the Red Moon Motel, finding the manager in but obviously reluctant to tear himself away from his television set. Hanging in the doorway between the office and his living quarters, one eye on the set inside, he had complained that they were right in the middle of Danny Thomas. And eight-thirty was Dan Dailey. He never missed either program.
But during the commercial they managed to get his attention long enough to look at the photo they had confiscated from Holly Berry’s apartment. “Don’t know a thing about her,” he said. “People come and go a place like this. You know how it is. I can’t remember their faces—” continuing in this vein until his wife slammed the connecting door shut, cutting off the source of his distraction. “Virginia Graham, that’s her program,” he said peevishly. “Try talking to her during Graham, see how far you get.”
But appearing resigned, he plodded over to the counter, and from underneath, pulled a cardboard file which he said contained this month’s registrations. “What’s that date again? Thirteenth? Thirteenth,” he kept muttering as he riffled through the cards. “Give me a minute here. My wife does the book work and sometimes she gets the dates—Here it is.” He peered at the card. “ ‘H. Berry.’ No street address, just Los Angeles. You want the car license number?”
While Casey took it down, Krug shoved the photo under the manager’s nose again. “Sure you don’t recognize her? She was with a tall guy driving a Jag convertible. Sharp dresser. Kind of long hair.”
“H. Berry. Why, sure I do! He checked in early, I remember. She stayed in the car”—shrugging—“like they always do. I put ’em in Number Nine at the back.”
“You have phones in your rooms?” Casey asked.
“No, no phone service. But we got everything else. TV’s in every unit. Free coffee. Free ice for—”
“That’s fine,” Krug cut him off. “What we’re interested in right now is when this girl left. The time. And if she was alone or not.”
“Well, I couldn’t really say.” Squinting, the manager scrutinized the photo. “Pretty little thing.” Then some idea blanked out his interest. “Say, look here, if this is about her being under age or something like that, I don’t want any trouble. Our name in the papers, any of that stuff. Gives a place a bad—”
“No problem,” Krug soothed him. “All we’re after is a little information. See, they fished her out of the bay this morning, and so far we can’t locate anybody who knows anything about her.”
“My Lord, is that the one? I just got through reading about it in my Outlook!” He stared at the photo. “Such a cute little thing. It’s a shame, isn’t it? You wonder what’s got into kids these days. Girls out there thumbing rides. Taking dope. Seems like they’re bound and determined they’re going to end up like she did.”
“What we’d like to know is, if you noticed when she left here. Like the same night, say. Or early the next morning.”
“Well, let’s see.” Frowning, patting the thin strands of hair which were carefully combed across his baldness, he pondered for a moment. “The thirteenth. That was a week ago yesterday—Tuesday, right? Has to be, because ten o’clock it’s Robert Young on Channel—”
“Something happen at ten?”
“I’m trying to tell you. I had this check-in. Right in the middle of the program. Maybe you saw that show. The one about this big shot had this fatal lung disease? No, I guess you didn’t. You ought to watch that show. You missed a real good—Well, anyway, these folks that I checked in claimed they couldn’t get their key to work. So of course I had to go try it for ’em. That was Number Eleven, next door to the one she was in—” pointing to the photo lying on the counter. “Anyhow, the lights were on in Nine, I remember, and they had the set going. At least, I thought they did till I went in the next day and found the coin slot jammed. ’Course, she could of done it,” he added, “and he was just covering up the next morning.”
“What about the next morning?”
“Well, what’s-his-name—Berry—came banging on the door here about eight or so. Early, anyhow. Got me out of bed to let him into Nine. ‘Listen,’ I told him, ‘all you had to do was ask when you checked in, I could’ve given you an extra key.’ Anyway, he said she’d been sick or something the day before. You wonder he wouldn’t of got a doctor for her if he was so worried, wouldn’t you? And the way he talked, he hadn’t been there all night…So anyhow, I opened up Nine for him. But she’d cleared out, you could see that plain as day.”
“Did he seem surprised?” Casey asked. “That she was gone, I mean?”
“Well, I’d say so, yes. At first, anyway. The way I figured it from the questions he asked, she must’ve been two-timing him, something like that.”
“What kind of questions do you mean?”
“Oh, you know. Did I see a car there—hear anybody—see anybody, things like that.”
“Did you?” Casey asked.
“I really couldn’t tell you, and that’s a fact. You know how it is these places. People come in and out all the time, I don’t pay any attention. All I could tell him is what I’m telling you—the lights were on, I heard the set going, and that’s all I—”
“What made you think it was the television you heard?”
“Well, it sounds different. You know what I mean. Some fella’s raving his head off, but you don’t think anything about it ’cause you can tell it’s an actor.”
“That’s all you heard, then? A man’s voice?”
He nodded, looking uncomfortable suddenly. “See, like I told him, people’s business is their own a place like this. You know how it is. They don’t come here expecting you to put your key in the lock every little thing you happen to hear—”
“Farr and his mysterious assailant,” Krug muttered, irascible as usual as they headed westward on Wilshire again. “Bullshit. He bailed her out, put her in the motel, picked up her stuff, then came back. They probably smoked the stuff she had stashed at her place and balled it up half the night, then he took off. By the time he got back the next morning, she’d packed up her stuff and left.”
“And spent the whole week underground?”
“Well, you heard the guy, it was a rough night. She probably ducked in with some other heads. They’re like winos that way. Somebody’s always got a crash pad someplace.”
“So then what? Farr found her a week later and killed her for running out on him?”
“It’s happened, sport, you better believe it.”
“I don’t know,” Casey said wearily. “Somehow I can’t see Farr as a sex nut.”
“Anybody’s a nut that touches that stuff.”
“We don’t know that he does.”
“Listen, the way that guy lives, he could easy be a pusher. Maybe she was thinking of turning him in—” Krug sucked in his breath as Casey ran the yellow at Fourteenth, narrowly missing a car which had jumped the opposite signal. “Anybody ever tell you you drive like a maniac?”
“Not in the last half-hour, no. Al, why do you think Farr’s guilty?”
“Because he acts guilty. Under that smart-prick lawyer front, he’s spooky as hell.” He waited, turned in the seat so he could look at Casey. “Well, isn’t he? But okay,” he went on without
waiting for an answer, “say he’s leveling with us he wasn’t laying her. Didn’t know her from Adam, she’s just some cookie he met at a party. Then why does he stick his neck out for her? A guy doesn’t take a day off from work and drive clear downtown to bail out somebody he hardly knows—unless there’s a reason.”
“Couldn’t it be as simple as he knew they’d only let her have one call, and he had to go or she’d be stuck in jail?”
“Huh, him I don’t picture doing the good-guy bit. No, I say we haven’t heard half what Farr knows. There’s plenty more, plenty he’s not telling us—and for my money, it smells like dope.”
“Well, that may be in it somewhere,” Casey admitted.
“What d’you mean, ‘may be.’ For chrissake, we got a junkie brother hiding out someplace. We got a dead girl that was booked for possession, with an armful of hit marks—”
“The wrong armful if she was right-handed. And don’t forget, it was only last week the hospital released her. Unless they slipped up, those needle marks got there between then and now.”
Krug shifted restlessly, glaring out at the evening traffic which was light at this time in Santa Monica. “Okay, leave that part lay. Let’s stick with Farr and his screwy story for a minute. He didn’t kill her, but the guy who did followed him there to the motel. He grabs her, holds her for a week, and finally kills her. Baloney! If Farr didn’t do it, he knows who did and why. Otherwise, why’s he so spooked? If he’s clean, what’s his problem?”
“Seems to me—” Casey hesitated. “Well, involvement’s enough to give him nightmares, isn’t it? Think what happens if the papers get hold of it. ‘Lawyer Leads Murderer to Terrified Victim.’ He’s not wrong to be spooked. Because if that’s what did happen, no amount of explanation is going to keep him from looking like anything but a silly, coldhearted, self-centered bastard. Which means his career as well as his image takes a nasty dent. Maybe bad enough to really count. Fancy young lawyers can’t afford that kind of notoriety.”
“ ‘Notoriety.’ You kill me, you know that? Christ, I’m so hungry my stomach thinks my throat’s cut. I say let’s check in and sleep on it. Maybe tomorrow we can come up with something solid. Solider,” he added sourly, “than worrying about some guy worrying about his notoriety.”
Street lights shining through the ugly old pines that lined his street cast a spiderweb pattern of shadows through Casey’s bedroom windows, and as the rising wind thrashed the branches, the network writhed on the ceiling eerily. Once he’d been frightened when the wind blew like this and that black net swayed over him threateningly. But I was protected, he thought. Except from imagination. I was sheltered. All I had to do was yell, and there was always somebody to come.
But for Holly there had been no one. Maybe never had, and twenty years old, she already knew there wouldn’t be. But she had hoped Farr would—what? Believe her? Spare her? I’m trying to tell you, his shout echoed in Casey’s mind. He must have followed me there. He must have been waiting for her. Some fella raving his head off. But she didn’t yell for help. Farr said the killer must have seen him with her clothes. A brown pants suit. And now the belt is missing—
Which means nothing, Casey thought. That was a week ago at the motel. A whole week. It could have been her brother that night. Or the uncle. Maybe it really was the television and all the rest is only Farr’s panicky lie. Whatever happened, Casey reminded himself sleepily, Holly Berry was alive till yesterday. What we have to know is where she was last night, and who with—because that’s when she died. Last night.
TWELVE
Moving as quietly as possible in the sleeping house, Casey rose, shaved and dressed quickly, attended by the dogs, who were ecstatic, but willing, fortunately, to be shushed. Nails clicking on the bare waxed floor between carpets, they followed him to the kitchen, and sat waiting expectantly while he measured out coffee and filled the pot—according to instructions—with cold water. “Sorry, fleabites,” he whispered, “you’ll have to wait for your breakfast.” Then feeling silly for whispering—no one in the bedrooms of this rambling old California bungalow could hear him in here—he pushed the dogs out the back screen door.
While the coffee perked in its electric pot, he squeezed oranges, slid bread into the toaster, then went out the back way down the drive to retrieve the morning newspaper. The sky was sparkling clear, but sunless yet, for it was barely dawn. Instead of the sea as usual, Casey noticed, the air had an inland smell, dry and fragrant of eucalyptus. No dew on the front lawn this morning. For sure it was going to be a hot one.
When he came through the open gate into the back yard again, Casey saw that Bimbo, the youngest dog, was silently chasing blackbirds. Racial memory? he wondered. Well, half a memory. Bimbo was only part spaniel. The two older dogs sat by passively as Bimbo stopped to drink noisily from the goldfish pond. Then both ambled over to try a taste. Like kids, Casey thought, monkey see, monkey do. The odor of coffee came floating through the screen door—finer, he decided as always, than all the perfumes of Araby. Too bad it never tastes as good as it smells. Coffee was a perfect example of anticipation exceeding actual experience.
Unfolding the newspaper, he spread it out as a table mat for his coffee cup and plate of toast—a habit his mother deplored. But it made sampling the news easy. This morning there was another Mideast crisis; unemployment was rising, inflation was unchecked; everything seemed to be falling apart. Holly Berry’s murder hadn’t made the front page, but under the heading Murdered Boy’s Hat Found, Casey skimmed the opening paragraphs of a terse recapitulation of the Sampson case. It was like a formula now after all these weeks. A formula without a solution so far.
On Tuesday, August 30, six-year-old Joel Sampson—wearing a red cowboy outfit which was a birthday present from his grandparents—had been seen near Webster School in Malibu getting into a dark sedan driven by a bearded man. Since the boy was the only son of a prosperous electronics manufacturer, kidnapping was assumed the motive. But as the days dragged on with no sign from the kidnapper, fears of a more heinous sort of crime began to arise. Fears which were finally corroborated when, on Wednesday, September 7, the savagely mutilated putrefying corpse was discovered in the mountains overlooking Malibu.
Remembering the explicit medical examination report which had been circulated to all the divisions, Casey choked on his mouthful of toast. “Savagely mutilated” was a gentle newspaper euphemism for what had actually been done to the boy—a monstrous exercise in sexual sadism, obviously the work of a maniac. A maniac who’s still at large, Casey thought. Makes you wish you were a bus driver, Haynes had said. Anything but a cop. Was it always a struggle for a policeman to keep from worrying about and hating his fellow man? he wondered as he leafed through the front section of the paper. Detachment was the answer, of course. But, oh God, possessed of the person of that perverted monster, how could you keep from killing him, or at the very least, throwing him to the mob?
He spied a tiny box item about Holly Berry—four lines of newsprint saying she had been found in the sea, foul play was suspected, bay-area police were seeking an unknown assailant. Santa Monica wasn’t even mentioned.
By the time he left the house—driving sedately, for a change, to Civic Center—the sun was up; and by the time he had his reports finished, it was a white-hot blaze through the second-floor windows of the squad room, already creating watery mirages on the more distant parts of the asphalt parking lot around the civic complex. Krug tramped in early in a foul mood—presaging a lousy day, Casey knew. But everyone else seemed cheery enough. “Hot enough for you?” “Wow, I’ll say!” Even Haynes, the chronic doomsayer seemed chipper over the change of weather.
As usual their day began with the rundown, starting with a brief review by the Captain of the cases they might cooperate on with other divisions. This morning there was the ambush of a uniformed patrolman in Highland Park, several bank robberies—three in metropolitan Los Angeles, one in the Valley, and another in Culver City—and of paramount an
d continuing importance, the kidnap and murder of Joel Sampson.
The case was at a dead end still, the Captain told them, and public pressure was at a boiling point. If they didn’t believe him, read the letters to the editor in the Los Angeles Times this morning. The parents of the boy had made a plea on television last night which didn’t help matters any. The boy’s left boot was still missing. And in Van Nuys, the latest suspect had been cleared as expected; she was now under psychiatric observation. Of the kidnap murderer there was not a trace. “So there it is,” he finished flatly. “No leads, no suspects, nothing. And for all we know, he’s got another one picked out.” Then he stalked off, banging his office door closed.
“All right,” Lieutenant Timms said, “let’s get going on our own mess of trouble,” and for the next fifteen minutes they discussed and collated the overnight and daily reports on every case still open in Santa Monica—as usual with the new ones, finding blank areas in their investigations. “On this knifing case,” Timms said, “how about somebody checking out the funeral? There’s bound to be drinking and a lot of talk. Isn’t there any way we can listen in on some of it?”
“Well, there’s always Piggy,” Ralph Zwingler suggested.
Even Timms had to grin at the idea, for Rafael “Piggy” Ponce was the least reliable of all their informers—an unstable, mostly unemployed car washer who periodically got religion, or something, and forswore such bad and dangerous habits as bearing witness against his neighbors.
“Let’s leave it for now,” Timms said, “and get on with the Berry murder. Which incidentally”—looking at Casey—“I’d like reports on daily. Not the next morning, the same day. You get the message, I hope.”
The Complete Krug & Kellog Page 6